An old university lecture from Valve boss Gabe Newell is making the rounds online, with clip merchant WebKnower racking up millions of views on YouTube sharing snippets of Newell's advice. The talk is still interesting today, and in one especially popular clip, Newell examines "the biggest mistakes game developers make."
The video circulating, "Gabe Newell Explains Game Developers [sic] Biggest Mistake," might be a bit of a reach, but Newell's argument is reasonable. You're better off watching the full talk on the YouTube channel for the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas, where Newell spoke to students in 2013. This particular comment comes up around 51:30 into the video.
One presumed student asks Newell about security and tech concerns around games as interactive, digital products. "It sounds like, with building these worlds, that it would almost be easy for a hacker to figure out how to use your world to do something that you really, really, really don't want them to do," the off-screen person says.
In his response, Newell argues that, "First of all, there are multiple kinds of hacking. One of the biggest mistakes game developers make is to mistake a genuinely entertaining action by a player as hacking."
He brings up an "example game developers tell each other" with regards to hacking: "When Lord British was killed during his first speech in Ultima Online, they rolled the world back rather than recognizing that it was the coolest thing that had ever happened in Ultima Online."
On August 9, 1997, the character of video game forerunner Richard Garriott, often known as Lord British and embodied in Ultima Online under the persona, was killed by another player in what's come to be known as a grand assassination.
The Branson universe wiki has a useful summary of the event (there's also a good archive and video from Razimus Gaming). After a crash interrupted a server event, the invincibility for the character of Lord British was mistakenly left disabled when Garriott logged in again, leaving him vulnerable to other players. One onlooker, a player named Rainz, hit Lord British with a fire spell and killed him. Ever since, killing Lord British in Ultima games has become an Easter egg and a tradition.
هەفتانە هەرسکردنەکان، چیرۆکەکانی ئەو کۆمەڵگایانەی کە خۆشت دەوێن و زۆر شتی تر
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